Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [68]
The second round opens with a National Geographic employee wheeling out a Chinese mime made up as a terra-cotta warrior, so that Alex can ask a question about China’s Shaanxi Province. Caitlin Snaring had warned me about this.
“At nationals, they bring out objects to distract you! ‘This is the tool they use to fork out people’s brains in Fiji!’ So you don’t pay attention to that.” The visual aids range from ancient artifacts to live animals—penguins, maybe, or armadillos. Last year, a nervous kookaburra caused some excitement by leaving a little souvenir onstage during its brief appearance.
“Well, they use them to entertain the audience,” her mom had explained. This less sinister explanation hadn’t even occurred to Caitlin. Anything that interrupted her laserlike focus was the enemy !
Kennen Sparks of Utah and Zaroug Jaleel of Massachusetts both misidentify the major river of Shaanxi Province as the Yangtze (it’s the Yellow). Then, two rounds later, they both miss questions on archaeological sites, making them the first two finalists to be eliminated. I notice, during this round, that the questions the kids struggle with aren’t always the ones you expect. Shantan Krovvidi of North Carolina earns a strike for not knowing that Salisbury is the closest city to Stonehenge, while Kennen goes out for guessing that the largest city in the West Bank is Jerusalem. (It’s actually Hebron.) These are reasonably well-known bits of cultural literacy, but the kids blank on them, even as they nail much harder questions about the Turkish city of Izmir or the islands of Vanuatu. Their knowledge has come from a firehose blast of atlases and encyclopedias, not a lifetime of travel and media. It isn’t lived in, like ours.
A Smithsonian curator enters, holding a gorilla skull for the kids to ignore while they’re asked for the name of the East African chain of volcanoes in which mountain gorillas live. Four boys fail to come up with the name of the Virunga Mountains, including Siva Gangavarapu, who—heartbreakingly—wrote “Virunga Mts” on his card, then crossed it out and began to write “Rwenzori” as time expired. Each time someone walks offstage, the pace of play accelerates, the next round becoming just a little bit shorter. Suddenly, half the seats are empty.
The next three rounds of questions eliminate one contestant apiece, in the orderly manner of a children’s counting rhyme. (“Ten Little Indian Americans”?) Kenji’s little Auto-Tuned chirp of a voice, so reliable in earlier rounds, is unable to identify Mexicali, Mexico, in his allotted twelve seconds, and then there were four. Ten-year-old Vansh doesn’t know that Clew Bay is in Ireland, and then there were three. Finally, in the tenth round, Shantan is stumped on the name of a Bulgarian port city. After his incorrect guess, he looks to his left: Eric Yang hasn’t missed a single question, but Arjun and Shantan each entered the round with one strike against them. If Arjun misses his question as well, Shantan will get a new lease on life and could still make the finals.
“Arjun, which South American country has phased out its former currency, the sucre, and adopted the United States dollar as its official currency?”
Arjun bites his lip. “Ecuador?” he tries.
“Ecuador is right!” announces Alex. Arjun lowers his head and pumps his fists quietly. Shantan has just won the third-place prize, a $10,000 scholarship, but he still looks awfully unsatisfied as he turns off his mike and rises to walk into the wings. He was so close.
The two finalists, Eric and Arjun, switch seats for the finals.